The Towers Sang
by bendingwind
Summary: River. Five deaths she didn't die and one she did.


**The Towers Sang**

_by bendingwind_**  
><strong>

A little girl with blonde curls had long-since claimed corner of a shabby pair of streets in the undercity of Okseer 7, and she sat there with a small coin cup every day after school. Most of her food came from the charity kitchens three streets over, and most of the coins she gained from sympathetic passerby went to pay the fees to attend a school out of her area, one that was better. As she grew older and prettier, the other grubby patrons of her street corner began to suggest that she drop out of school and go work in the red light district. She'd make courtesan in no time with an apartment of her own, pretty as she was, they told her. When she was fifteen, she listened to them.

Two months later the shady brothel owner she worked for sent her to see a man in the poorer area of middlecity. He stabbed her three times in the back and dumped her in the trash conduit right before he disposed of the extras from his job as a butcher. She wasn't missed. 

* * *

><p>A man who worked in one of the great Factories of Wey-Xi spent an entire night consoling his colicky newborn daughter, and as a consequence fell asleep and allowed several hundred faulty latches to slip through production unnoticed.<p>

Key Fairbairn, master thief, used one of these latches in a bank robbery on Hugot, and as a consequence fell approximately seventy meters down a ventilation shaft to his death, and therefore never met or tutored River Song in the art of breaking, entering, and thieving.

River Song attempted to steal a famous (and famously valuable) headdress from Iccar Nine shortly after she reached the age of majority, despite having received no formal instruction in the art of stealing, and as a consequence spent the rest of her life in a low-level prison in Karr, its capital city.

The Doctor never met River, and as a consequence, he met and saved a low-level troublemaker named Kissing Karsina. He later claimed she had reminded him of Donna Noble, a companion who had sacrificed herself in the Library in order to save his life. Kissing Karsina was sentenced to five years in jail for peddling of illegal substances on Iccar Nine a year later.

She set up a ring to trade Jarian Tentacle Mucus—a rather lovely hallucinogenic, as it happened, with few side-effects—which in turn triggered a fight in the hallway. A Tree attempted to stab her with an appendage it wasn't registered as having, missed, and pinned River Song to the wall. All attempts to save her by the medically inept prison nurse failed; she died at nine the next morning and was buried in the prison cemetery in a standard-issue plastic bio-containment box. 

* * *

><p>When she was twenty one years old, River Song didn't take a wrong turn on her way to Intro to Sontaran Prehistory, and so she wasn't late for class and never ran into a floppy-haired man with an absurd sense of fashion. She sat in class and dutifully took notes on the dull lecture, with only minor scribbles in the margins of her paper. That night, she boarded a ship bound for a world where a bit of lost Sontaran technology was said to reside, with every intention of stealing it and selling it to pay for her next year of graduate school.<p>

The ship exploded mid-voyage due to a faulty motherboard in one of the monitors. There were no survivors. 

* * *

><p>A slightly ridiculous accident involving a pair of absurdly high heels—not her favorite red pair, but a purple pair with an extra half-inch that she rather liked—left River with a broken arm two weeks before she was scheduled to be released on parole. This was a problem, as the condition for her parole was that she help the church retrieve a highly sought-after statue from an Aplan Mortarium on Alfava Metraxis. A quick nap in a medical bay with advanced technology repaired her arm, but it was still a little weak, and she made a note not to strain it.<p>

Seventeen days later her arm gave out and she fell with the Weeping Angels. The Doctor was the only one to remember her, and he stored her carefully in the pantheon that existed in the dark part of his memory, reserved for people he killed. 

* * *

><p>River's life consisted of dashing between meetings with the prison parole program and interviews with naïve young business tycoons (the favorite easy target of any decent conwoman), and she was desperately raking papers for a presentation together when her associate, Anita, spilled coffee on a bit of correspondence. She glanced at the name—some hoity-toity heir that she'd already tried and failed to swindle—and told Anita to toss it in the trash. Mr. Lux found another archaeologist—this one real, as it so happened—to accompany him, and River never heard from him again.<p>

Ten years later she bravely fought when Sky, vessel of The Silence, invaded the planet she was living on. She was one of the last, but like everyone else onworld when Sky arrived, she died, smothered without a sound. 

* * *

><p><em>River dies with tears on her cheeks, a smile on her face, and she's not sure whether it's the electricity frying her brain or real, true joy, but it feels like bliss.<em>


End file.
